Quote:
Originally Posted by dirtbikerxz
In all honesty, given extra time, would a team (no matter what they say about liking stop build day) actually stop building based on a internal bag day?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nerdrock101
we do spend time after stop build working on code and other small projects. However, it is with a much lower intensity than working on the actual bot simply because it is small projects.
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Looking at these two quotes (and some of the discussion going on in the last ~2 dozen replies), it seems there was a bit of a ships-passing-in-the-night going on with the whole discussion about "6 weeks is/isn't a lie" and self-imposed limits.
Part of the argument that Allen presents in his
34 slides is that the 6 weeks (his 45.5 days) is already a sort of "super" internal limit. "Super" in that there are some hoops to jump through, but it is still in many ways an internal limit: each team chooses how much time and effort they put into development after Stop Build Day. Some teams choose to actually stop, some teams (as nerdrock mentioned above) choose to work on small improvements and modifications. Some, however, choose to make radical changes eg rebuilding entire robots at competition (speaking from experience, under Allen's mentorship myself and the other members of the 3847 pit crew completely changed our robot at the 2015 Arkansas Regional).
This is what's being referred to as the "myth of the 6 week build season" - the idea that it's as long and grueling as you make it.
If the man-hours given to development are already a matter of self-regulation and evaluation of a team's own response to that "competitive pressure," and if each team already responds in a different degree, there's no reason to expect that to change if we #BanTheBag. Teams will continue to respond to the same competitive pressure, albeit with a barrier removed that improves convenience. A team that already wasn't driven to bring in a new subsystem or some spare parts under withholding probably won't be that much more likely to actually go through with those plans under a Bag-Free regime, it just makes it easier for the teams that already wanted to but found it difficult to do so (lack of resources to test on practice robot, difficulty in preparing modifications for a robot you can't test them on, etc.).